The Man in the Black Coat Turns by Robert Bly (review)

282 Western American Literature ship and L. A.’s decadence, she drives the freeway north to “River Ranch,” owned by her brother and his bizarre “share-holders.” But she refuses to join the gang, rejecting all interference in her life: “ ‘I am not into this. I feel like being by myself for a while. The meetings and common work and telling everybody else in the kingdom what to do, that I can’t handle.’” She heads to the river, where she finds a “simple pride, a satisfaction, and a kind of peace” in building her lean-to. On a remote bluff, she plants her own bean-field, a private marijuana crop, and tends to her writing. But Rose cannot escape involvement in the River Ranch escapades, nor, she discovers, does she want to. She takes part in debates, helps mediate conflicts about communal obligations, and instigates the climax, helping her bumbling non-violent brother play sheriff by running the bad guy “off the ranch.” Rose comes to accept her “share” in River Ranch by deciding to share, literally, her private pot patch, and, symbolically, her life. Through acknowledging her ties to her fledgling community, she discovers for the first time “how to act.” Home Ground is a funny, sharp, and satirical look at the lifestyles, values, and obsessions of a generation cut loose from traditional roots. And yet I was struck by the “rootedness” of Holland’s themes. Her “settlers,” like those before them, find that their new world is corruptible, that experi­ ence may really be preferable to innocence, that they possess conflicting desires for individual freedom and democratic action. Although succeeding generations of American rebels deny the relevance of the past, the old ques­ tions continue to crop up in new disguises. MELODY GRAULICH University of New Hampshire The Man in the Black Coat Turns. By Robert Bly. (New York: The Dial Press, 1981. 62 pages, $10.95.) Robert Bly’s new book of poems has three untitled sections, each with a loose stylistic unity. The first section includes poems that will be familiar to readers of The Light Around the Body (1967) and Bly’s eight other previous volumes. Thematically the section deals with blocked energies and institutional failure (“the Empire / dying in its provincial cities”), but there are also hope and “days that pass in / undivided tenderness.” An elegy for Pablo Neruda is included as well, perhaps Bly’s most touching, scrupulous poem. Throughout, Bly tries to release the numinous qualities of everyday things, and to bring into everyday consciousness the Jungian perspectives of oneiric space and time. The second section is comprised of six prose poems, and the longest and best of these is “Finding an Ant Mansion.” Here Bly’s spiritual alle­ Reviews 283 gorizing is starkest and most forceful, as he literally domesticates a natural object, a “vvood-chunk,” and in the process focusses his associative search for a “complete soul home.” After a careful, almost microscopic description, ecstatically heightened, he has the “mansion” harbor “the souls of the dead,” particularly those of his relatives and neighbors. While turning the wood into a memorial of human labor and destiny, he is also freed to see it as subject to natural forces, “still open to the rains and snows.” In many ways the poem epitomizes Bly’s work in the genre of the prose poem, where he has successfully joined the vigor of natural history to the ecstasies of desire and memory. The prose poems are to my mind Bly’s best work, because his ear is resistant to fixed measures and he works more comfortably with a prose rhythm that relies on an alternation of intensity and relaxation of stress and watchfulness. Many poets turn slack in the prose poem, becom­ ing indulgent in their use of imagery and too precious in their cadences. But Bly, having absorbed such French models as Ponge, finds in this genre just the right mixture of play and contemplative energy. In a sense we can see Bly at work in his prose poems; he has less need to hide the secret springs of his thought and feeling, and so puts us closer to the heart of his...